Poseur Alert Nominee

“At the height of the storm, anyone outside will face a fearsome blizzard. Innocent snowflakes turn to painfully stinging missiles, darts and tacks, propelled by gusting gales that scream over the seas and roar through the woods. In other words, high winds produce a crystalline ticker-tape parade of snowflakes: furiously falling and flowing flakes filling the fields, whisking past the windows, gliding to the ground and beautifying the bushes. The wild wind whips the snow into roadside rows and churns roof top snow into a creamy concoction with meandering smoky membranes of snow granules that dance to the edges and cascade down the sides. The storm’s gusty gales whip the snow into car-capturing, truck-trapping, bus-blocking, SUV-stalling drifts. It is among the great storms, one of the atmosphere’s awesome displays of change and violence among the momentous events that over time have shaped and changed the course of human events in ways wondrous and ominous,” – Elliot Abrams, AccuWeather.com. Update from a reader:

I’m pretty sure the quote from Abrams was tongue in cheek. He does AccuWeather’s forecasts on Chicago radio and quite often turns the forecast into a literary exercise, usually pretty amusing.

Another agrees:

Elliot Abrams is a regular on KYW News Radio here in the Philadelphia area. This type of forecast language is kind of a schtick with him. Sometimes it’s alliteration, sometimes rhymes, sometimes puns, but always in good fun and without taking himself too seriously. The anchors sometimes take some good natured digs at him for it too. So while it may seem a bit dorky, I this “Poseur Alert” is overly harsh in his case. Here’s another example of the kind of things he does on the radio:

Peter Mark Roget was born in mid-January of 1779. He developed the first thesaurus, allowing us to look up all kinds of synonyms. It also means we could look for words that mean the same thing. What’s coming next? What is just around the corner? What about the future? What’s the weather’s next move? What’s the next step? What about the weekend and next week?

A shot of very cold air is affecting us this week on the strength of face-freezing, collar-clutching, nose-nipping, toe-purpling, thumb-numbing, ice-box bitter, bird-blocking blusters. The icy jaws of winter have opened wide as they bring us face freezing winds from the icy dungeon of Jailer January. This air has crossed the arctic tundra, where venturing out without proper protection is a sure invitation to frozen doom. It won’t be just the glacial frigid gelidity that contributes to the feeling of hyperborean chill, but also the adiathermic biting and piercing hiemal keen and nipping winterbound niveous isocheimal and polar unwarmed infrigidation that numbs our thumbs and freezes our toes.

In short, we’ll face the needles of winter’s icy fingers and the piercing refrigerated ice box blasts of marrow-chilling, teeth-chattering, glaciated, bitter blusters of January cold. There’s no bybassing of the bitterness, no solace from the sun. By the way, it’s gonna be cold.